In Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, he describes a “general rule” of politics that “never or rarely fails.” “He who is the cause of another becoming powerful,” Machiavelli wrote, “is ruined. Because that predominancy has been brought about either by astuteness or else by force, and both are distrusted by him who has been raised to power.” This is an apt political epitaph for former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who died Sunday at age 82. In 1989, nearly 500 years after The Prince was published, Rafsanjani helped anoint his longtime comrade Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as supreme leader of Iran. He would spend the next three decades of his life trying, unsuccessfully, to wrestle power back from the man he enthroned.

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The Rafsanjani-Khamenei friendship-cum-rivalry resembles a Shiite Shakespearean drama. It began over five decades ago, when both were acolytes of the Ayatollah Khomeini who traded their seminary studies for a life of political agitation against the monarchy of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Both men spent years in and out of prison in the 1960s and 1970s, Rafsanjani for his alleged role in the assassination of Iranian Prime Minister Hassan Ali Mansur in 1965. While Khamenei used his time in prison to translate the works of Egyptian militant Islamist Sayed Qutb, Rafsanjani wrote a book about a 19th-century nationalist prime minister named Amir Kabir, who had been assassinated. Fellow prisoner Abbas Milani, now a scholar at Stanford University, recalled that Rafsanjani was also an “enthusiastic but clumsy volleyballer.”

The 1979 revolution catapulted both men from anonymity into power. Khamenei became Iran’s president and Rafsanjani a much more powerful speaker of parliament, given his close rapport with Khomeini. When Khomeini died in 1989 with no clear successors, Rafsanjani claimed, without proof, that the revolutionary leader’s dying wish was for Khamenei to succeed him. A remarkable video of these clerical deliberations was leaked by the Rafsanjani family for a Swedish documentary years ago.

Rafsanjani likely believed Khamenei would be a weak, pliant supreme leader whom he could control. This initial meekness was reflected in Khamenei’s inaugural speech. “I am an individual with many faults and shortcomings,” he said, “and truly a minor seminarian.” In time, however, a power rivalry between the two men naturally emerged, and their distinct worldviews became clearer. Rafsanjani was motivated by reconstruction (in the aftermath of the ruinous Iran-Iraq war) and wealth creation (both his own and the country’s) more than ideology, and Khamenei, in contrast, believed that compromising on revolutionary principles would hasten the regime’s collapse, just as perestroika helped undo the Soviet Union.

To stay in power, both men were willing to imprison and assassinate regime critics, at home as well as abroad. But key differences emerged between them on foreign policy. For Rafsanjani Iran’s support for radicalism seemed to be a means to an end, while for Khamenei it was an end unto itself. Khamenei opposed relations with the United States and was hostile to Saudi Arabia, while Rafsanjani favored détente with Washington and a cordial working relationship with Riyadh. (The Iranian chef at the al-Khayyam Persian restaurant at the Hilton in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, once told me that the Rafsanjani family dined with them several times a year when visiting Mecca.)

The fundamental differences between the two men were also reflected in their families. Khamenei grew up the son of a poor cleric in the Shiite holy city of Mashad, and each of his four sons became clerics. Rafsanjani’s family were pistachio merchants from the sun-soaked southeastern province of Kerman, and his three sons became businessmen. Khamenei’s reputation for asceticism prolonged his political longevity, while the fortunes allegedly amassed by Rafsanjani and his children brought about their political demise.

For Iranians who lived through the 1980s and 1990s, Rafsanjani was not the antidote to corruption and repression—he embodied it.

This was evidenced in Iran’s 2005 presidential election, when Rafsanjani faced the then-obscure populist mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a second round run-off. I was based in Tehran then and remember an artist friend who shunned politics but had been urged by her friends to vote against Ahmadinejad. His election would further curtail civil liberties, they warned. “I wrote Rafsanjani’s name on the ballot,” she told me, “but I could not get myself to physically drop it in the ballot box.” For Iranians who lived through the 1980s and 1990s, Rafsanjani was not the antidote to corruption and repression—he embodied it. Ahmadinejad won handily; Rafsanjani was humiliated.

As the revolution aged it grew more militarized—the Revolutionary Guards soon eclipsed the political and economic authority of the clergy—while Rafsanjani, in contrast, mellowed with age. In 2009 Rafsanjani spoke out against Ahmadinejad’s tainted reelection—which provoked massive popular uprisings—though he stopped short of criticism that could unsettle the Islamic establishment that he had ruthlessly helped create. He may have resented Khamenei, but he understood that if they did not hang together, they would hang separately.

Iranians of a younger generation remembered him less for his corruption, and more as a counterweight against the country’s hardline forces. That many young Iranians hoped, despite his advanced age, that Rafsanjani could bring them deliverance was more a reflection of their desperation for change than a genuine affinity for an 82-year-old cleric. “It's not that we liked him,” wrote one young Iranian on Twitter after his death, “We needed him.”

While Rafsanjani likely hoped to be remembered by history as a modernizing nationalist hero, like his biographical subject Amir Kabir, historians are not likely to be so generous. He deserves credit for creating an “Open University” system that helped educate millions of Iranians, and for mentoring a competent younger generation of technocrats and diplomats, like Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.

But Rafsanjani’s political career spanned a period in which Iran exiled millions of its inhabitants, imprisoned and executed tens of thousands, and needlessly prolonged a war, with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that brought about some half a million casualties by one estimate. Rafsanjani was at worst directly complicit in these policies and at best a silent bystander. He advocated mercy and moderation when out of power, but he exhibited insufficient amounts of it when he was in power.

The impact of Rafsanjani’s death on Iranian politics will be better understood in the coming months. President Hassan Rouhani, a Rafsanjani protege, is up for reelection in May 2017. Whatever the outcome, however, Rafsanjani’s death is not likely to change the longstanding fundamentals of power in Tehran that Rafsanjani helped shape. Though he was called Machiavellian in numerous obituaries, he was vanquished by the man whom he appointed, Ali Khamenei, whose careful cultivation of Iran’s security forces made clear he understood the most important Machiavellian rule of all. For authoritarian leaders it is preferable to have people’s fears rather than their affections. Rafsanjani had neither.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”